Why You Should Be Happy About Game Delays

This cloud has a silver lining. Several of them.

I'm 29 years-old and have been playing games on a near-daily basis for some 25 years. As I reflect back on that time -- especially when I was younger -- I'm surprised by how little I missed when it comes to games I actually wanted to play.

But as I get older, my time is becoming more and more precious. I'm being pulled in a bunch of different directions, whether in my relationship with my girlfriend, or with my side projects, or right here at work. I can't spend all of my free time playing games anymore. There are other things I want and need to do. And I know full well I'm not alone.

That's why every time a game I care about is delayed, I smile on the inside. And you should, too!

The last couple of years, I've often found myself overwhelmed when I began thinking about all of the games I so-called "need" to play. Unlike my younger years, in secondary school and even in college, I simply don't have the time to play everything I want to play. As I've mentioned multiple times on Podcast Beyond, I've had to accept that games I deem consequential will come and go without me playing them. And that -- as a lifelong, dedicated, hardcore gamer -- makes me profoundly sad.

Games getting pushed into the unknown future help alleviate this strain, which is why every time a game is delayed that I want to play, I feel a little less stressed-out. Sure, I'm still ultimately going to miss games that I want to play, but when more padding is but between them, I have a better chance at finding the time necessary to delve in. I am forced to make fewer sacrifices.

There's a lot of chatter about lulls in the release schedule, regardless of which platform(s) you play, and while I don't necessarily agree -- fantastic smaller, indie games come out every week, and those, too, keep me plenty busy -- the fact remains that the meaty experiences that we typically lose ourselves to tend to be of the triple-A variety. For every 90 minute game like The Unfinished Swan or Journey, there are 100-hour RPGs like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout: New Vegas. And frankly, who has the time to play the latter type of game back-to-back?

In this sense, game delays are good in the most selfish of terms. I welcome them with open arms because they allow me to retrace my steps into gaming's near past and figure out what I left by the wayside. Delays allow me to garner a more complete picture of what's being released and what has already been released, because publishers don't seem as fixated by hitting specific dates and windows as they once were. Of course major publishers would love for their games to be available for the holiday season, or during a strangely quiet time of year, when they can make a ton of noise. But if, say, 10 great games come out in October and November, you can't possibly play them all without quitting work or school, saying goodbye to your family and friends, and living in your bedroom. If two games come out every month from October through February, on the other hand? Well, then, you have a fighting chance.

There's a more obvious reason why game delays are good, of course. Quite simply (and quite obviously), extra time makes these delayed games better. As the old adage goes, a delayed game is only delayed for a little while, while a bad game is bad forever. When publishers like Ubisoft and Sony delay major games -- like Watch Dogs or The Last of Us -- what comes out on the other end is something more polished in every respect. Naughty Dog isn't shy about noting that The Last of Us only became a masterpiece after its delay; Ubisoft bounced Watch Dogs out of the next-gen consoles' launch windows to get it right, and reaped serious rewards on the flip side.

In an age where accusations fly about a lessening need for quality (my friend Jim Sterling covers this often), and in an always-connected era in the industry where patches fly around left and right to hide scars and blemishes that should have been fixed before launch, it's heartening that big developers and publishers care enough to eat more cost, take more time, and at least attempt to get it right. Publishers are businesses. They want to make money. Lots of it. But anyone accusing them of unrivaled and unbridled greed need to understand that these delays cost real cash, even if the idea is to make even more of it on the backend.

So, you see, this dark, dire cloud of recent game delays doesn't only have one silver lining, my friends. It has three: time, quality, and money. More sporadic and spread-out big game releases give us more time to play them while maintaining an ever-precious balance between our hobby and our lives. These scenarios also give us more time to play what we missed. Likewise, delays make the games you eagerly-await better, and they also allow older games to fill the vacuum at a cheaper rate.